WSY

Hello hello, Random person from the Internet here to suggest another couple ideas to the several hundreds already suggested, because we all know devs go to sleep at night looking forward to more every morning!!!! :o Kidding aside, I have some "hopefully" realistic suggestions that hope are in line with what the engine can already do, and I have some less realistic ones, because, why not. Also you will find I am fairly passionate about a good medium of balance, gameplay, and visuals. Also sorry for grammatical errors, doing this on the phone for lunch. Ok, so for the most realistic: Fighters are incredibly powerful, as well as they should be given their exuberant cost (I love fighters). I also love the Dodge mechanic but I feel like it does not scale properly with numbers. What I mean is that as the fighter flies in and out of range, you really have to focus everything on that one fighter to take him down, this gets much much worse when numbers increase and you involve ai ships or auto fire turrets that will switch targets (range, fire arc) and result in fighters always having dodges available. I had a trinium level ship, came back to beginner area to help friend and then, myself, had a hard time taking down system invasion iron area fighters. Now I don't have a ship with all big guns, I have a dozen scatter fire chain gun turrets as well. Which of course use to just slaughter fighters. After a few minutes of focusing on one...just one I had to give up. When I fire, the front of my ship looks like a six barreled automatic shot gun firing tracer rounds; it is a big wall of glowing pew pew, but still nothing went down. I think it would be a good idea to make it so dodge chances and associated cool down are server configurable, this would allow us to experiment to find a happy medium with guns we have. (Maybe you have this and I completely missed it) Now onto weapons. I think honestly all the mechanics are in place, but I think a really good point defense weapon are the zero spread rapid fire burst and overheating chain guns. They look like modern day AA fire, and / or the point defense fire from Earth ships in Stargate. A group of ships with a couple of these going off with arcs chasing fighters would be oh so sexy. From a mechanic perspective, these guns could have a higher percentage accuracy, maybe even over a hundred, or accuracy bonus against fighters, or not affected by the accuracy debuff against fighters, however you would want to do that. The overheating mechanic would then play a part as well, helping fighters use up their dodges but not guarantee a kill since it couldn't keep firing. You would need other similar turrets, or this would give your regular guns/laser a chance at killing the fighter. You could also make it super low damage vs the fighter and simply have it as an effective system for forcing fighters to use up their dodges. On the other hand these guns would not much damage vs other larger vessels either way. You could also make a pulse weapon version for players who have an aversion to bullets or a later game rapid fire rail gun version (ala Stargate) This could also be done with a point defense laser, (faster tracking, no accuracy debuff vs fighters) and also overheat quickly. You could then choose the route of super low damage so they use up the fighters dodge chances or make em more effective so they also do some damage, so if more than one focuses on same fighter or it is out of Dodge chances, it may take fatal damage. Really it would be just like the chain gun point defense mechanically, just different projectile type. Another suggestion, more difficult I'm sure to implement is a variation of a flack weapon. You could use bolters turret model and projectiles, but the max range would be like 3 k or so, then have a variation in projectile time to live within that 3k. When projectile hits or dies from ttl expiration, it could have a small AOE damage, such as .5 or .25, this does zero damage to cap ships, but hurts fighters. This kind of gun while largely ineffective against a lone fighter thanks to the randomized time to live on the shell, would be extremely effective against overwhelming swarms. Trade off being it would have to be a fairly thick swarm and one turret doesn't do enough damage, but would force fighters to use up dodge chances so other guns can hit them. Anyhow just some quick suggestions. Hit me up if you want more details and or ideas. I think the above could still allow fighters to be really effective, but allow ai and players a counter giving them some chances, while also making some good looking space battles. This would force someone such as myself to say oh look, blobs of flack, let's hit him with the longer range stuff from my ship and then send in the fighters. Even if someone has a mix, they are giving up big ship pew pew for point defense capability, and I feel would help strike a balance of effectiveness against a large group of fighters vs other large ships. I also feel like the relationship will scale fairly well as ship sizes and fighter number and turret number available to ships involved increase.

Looks like of you checked planned features, this is already planned as a legendary artifact.

Make it so only one of these drops on server, could be a fun pvp incentive. However would have to have a cool down or to work has to open a distance away from where you are so other fleets can catch you possibly. If you are playing pve with friends then one of you gets to be the "fleet command" ship

Hi Ancient Demise, I think is pretty much it. In some cases you can skip the match block step by lowering stepping and grid to .01 and fiddling that way. On large ships this can be a "good enough" for internal blocks (or exterior if your ship is big enough or your not that picky). If the ship is tiny and this is an exterior block, then there is not much else you can do. Interior blocks can also be forgiving as the engine does allow some overlap (which can also be abused). The trick is knowing what nearby block to snap the block your placing too.

Hi everyone, Due to work/life balance being messed up at the moment I have not had a chance to test or experiment; I was wondering if some one else could answer: So I know we now get 5 sectors that will run depending how many ships or stations are in it. So if I leave a sector protected by a fleet, will the xotan(forget their spelling) or pirates still invade, get blown up by my fleet, then my fleet pick up the modules or weapons if they are close enough? Thanks! (Edited because my phone and I are going through a rough patch in our forum posting, and spelling relationship)

I have found two sectors with abandoned stations. One was a empty sector with a solar station, wow did that have a butt load of resources. Another was asteroid field with a more heavily armored or thicker station, it also provided quite a bit. Came across both on the quest -rest in spoiler

Agree with the above. Main engines control max speed. Engines benefits can add up from 3 things. Volume = how much space it takes up which controls how much total thrust it provides. Material = how much it weighs (mass). Lighter material increases your thrust per weight ratio which increases acceleration. Engineers = at 100% you function as expected. You can add surplus of engineers for up 130% benefit. (You can add twice as many engineers that you need, but the benefit stops at 130%). This is important to keep in mind for when you add engines. Let's say you have a super huge engine that gives 500 units of thrust. Your at %100 for engineers. You add a little bitty engine, it gives 1 unit of thrust. You entire efficiency goes to 99% because you forgot to hire the extra engineer. 99% of 500 is 495. Plus your little engine running at 99% so another .9 thrust. Your new Total thrust is 495.9, that is 4.1 less than what you had even though you added an engine. It's not quite that simple due to ratio of engineers per volume of engine, but you get the general idea behind it. Now I don't remember if top speed is linked to volume of the engines or the volume and thrust to weight ratio. (Keep in mind this is somewhat counter intuitive to real life, where currently used forms of thrust - Non-theoretical or sci-fi - in space travel are more functions of surface and not volume.) Edited for clarification.

Original post said it took less volume and mass just to clarify. I am curious though, when you say more volume Entity, are you counting the 0.01 space between each panel? Or can you litterally stack the panels against each other without space? I would test myself but work/life balanced is a bit fubar right now.